Ideas on Europe

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We Can Steer This: How the European Parliament Told the Story of AI

Europe of Knowledge |

Anne Goldmann When the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act was finally adopted in 2024, most of the public debate had already moved on from how the Act regulates to whether it should. Headlines focused on the moments when it looked as if everything might still fall apart: the dispute over facial recognition and law enforcement powers1, […]

University Autonomy and Organizational Identity: What's the Story of Regional Universities in Kazakhstan?

Europe of Knowledge |

Danagul Yembergenova In 2018, Kazakhstan granted public universities greater institutional autonomy, encouraging them to become more entrepreneurial, internationally competitive, and responsive to societal and economic needs. But autonomy reforms do more than change governance arrangements; they reshape how universities understand themselves. Rather than asking whether universities have become more autonomous, our recent research asks a […]

Local university alliances, capital cities, and the ‘New Geography of Knowledge’ in Europe

Europe of Knowledge |

Lise Moawad The rise of university alliances has become a defining feature of the contemporary European higher education landscape. While transnational partnerships that have emerged through programs such as the European Universities Initiative (Gunn 2020) have received much attention, local university alliances, especially those based in capital cities, remain relatively understudied. These local configurations are […]

Ethics-policy advisory ecosystems: how can we draw comparisons?

Europe of Knowledge |

Marija Antanavičiūte Effective ethics-policy advisory systems are increasingly important in the context of rapid technological change, declining public trust in science, and shifting geopolitical dynamics. Questions about who becomes an ethics expert and who advises governments on ethical issues, who controls the narrative on major cross-national issues such as regulation and ethics of AI and […]

Chasing Indicators or Changing Practices? Ukrainian Universities under Performance‑Based Funding

Europe of Knowledge |

Kateryna Suprun In the increasingly turbulent economic environment facing many European higher education institutions (HEIs) (Pruvot et al., 2025), performance-based funding (PBF) remains a popular instrument for allocating at least part of core public funding (European Commission, 2023). Traditionally, PBF involves governments rewarding HEIs for meeting specific objectives – an approach often assumed to improve […]

Research Security and the EU’s Geopolitical Turn: Governing Knowledge in a Changing World

Europe of Knowledge |

Cristina Pinna Over the past decade, research security has moved from a technical concern discussed among specialists to a central issue in European research policy. What began as a debate about protecting sensitive technologies has expanded into a broader question about how knowledge should be governed in a changing geopolitical environment. Today, it shapes funding […]

Soft Authoritarian Transformation of Higher Education in Hungary: Taming Academic Freedom with Neoliberal Precarity

Europe of Knowledge |

Zahra Jafarova In the shifting landscape of European higher education, neoliberal reforms used to be celebrated as tools for financial efficiency and institutional autonomy. But how does such a market-oriented framework function when it is instrumentalized by a regime drifting away from democracy towards authoritarianism? In Hungary, the transformation of the university system stands out […]

Revisiting what problems the EU AI Act is actually solving

Europe of Knowledge |

Bao-Chau Pham When the European Union‘s Artificial Intelligence Act finally entered into force on 1 August 2024, it was widely described as a landmark: the world’s first comprehensive framework for regulating AI. Throughout the policy-making process from early 2018 onwards, much of the debates focused on how the Act regulates – its risk categories and […]

Higher education institutions for Europe: A territorial perspective

Europe of Knowledge |

Alina Felder-Stindt The European Union’s ambition to become a knowledge-based economy has transformed the role of higher education institutions (HEIs). My new book, The Territorial Dimension of EU Knowledge Policies: Higher Education Institutions for Europe (Routledge, 2025), explores how universities are not only shaped by European integration but also actively shape it, particularly through their […]

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